Following an earlier suggestion I have started putting words into whole sentences to fix them in my memory. The main challenge is not remembering the meaning but the gender of nouns. I have put 'poculum' into the following sentence:

Pocula ornantur gemmis sunt.

The cups are decorated with gems... Is it a correct use of the ablative?

Actually furrykef...what I thought I was doing here - and maybe you can show me where I've gone wrong - was using infinitive + accusative to report indirect speech and that Sanguinem, colorem and pulchrum would all be accusative as reported speech of Dracula. I've just come across this in Ch 11 of Orberg. You're saying it should be 'sanguinis eius colorem pulchrum esse'...dixit Dracula...right? But can't I say, for example, oculus eius aeger est...as an identity relationship? Now this may simply be down to what's idiomatic. But if you can say Oculus eius aeger est then could you not say oculus eius color ruber est...I can see why this may not be idiomatic and that you have to indicate 'colour of'.....Mind you I may be rambling here. I'll go back and look at Ch. 11 in more detail.

Ah, okay, part of the problem here, I think, is that "ornare" can be used in two ways: 1) the subject can be a person that is decorating something with something, but 2) the subject can also be the decoration itself.

pmda wrote:Actually furrykef...what I thought I was doing here - and maybe you can show me where I've gone wrong - was using infinitive + accusative to report indirect speech and that Sanguinem, colorem and pulchrum would all be accusative as reported speech of Dracula.

The reason you use the accusative is because the nouns become the direct object of "dīxit". What you're literally saying here is "Dracula said the color of his blood to be pretty" -- unidiomatic English, but it should illustrate the principle. Here, "color" is clearly a direct object, so it becomes "colōrem". Why does "pulcher" become "pulchrum" too? Because whenever the subject of "esse" is accusative, its predicate must also be accusative. Likewise, when the subject is nominative, the predicate must be nominative (compare "It is I" in English; "It is me" is colloquial English but bad Latin). But "sanguis" needn't become accusative because it is neither the direct object of dīxit nor the predicate of "esse"; instead, it modifies "colōrem", so it becomes "sanguinis".

pmda wrote:But if you can say Oculus eius aeger est then could you not say oculus eius color ruber est...

I don't know whether Latin would use the nominative ("oculus eius color ruber est") or the genitive ("oculus eius coloris rubri est"). This comes up because I know that in Spanish, to ask the color of something, you have to ask "¿De qué color es la pelota?" ("Of what color is the ball?"). But maybe that doesn't apply to Latin and for our purposes I'll assume the nominative is fine.

In this sentence, "color" and "ruber" are in apposition. It's hard to explain what apposition is, but it's basically when you have two nouns or noun phrases next to each other and one describes the other. Examples of apposition in English:* the color red (analogous to "color ruber")* the movie Star Trek IV* my friend Robert* Las Vegas, the city that never sleeps (here a comma separates the two phrases, but it's still apposition)

When you have "sanguinem eius colorem", the apposition seems awkward. What you have is, basically, "Dracula said that his blood color is pretty." It makes enough sense but I don't think the phrase "blood color" works that way in Latin. We do know, however, that "the color of his blood" should translate well into "color sanguinis", so I'd strongly recommend that phrase.

furrykef wrote:Why does "pulcher" become "pulchrum" too? Because whenever the subject of "esse" is accusative, its predicate must also be accusative. Likewise, when the subject is nominative, the predicate must be nominative (compare "It is I" in English; "It is me" is colloquial English but bad Latin).

By the way, I must add that this rule shouldn't be taken too literally. It's perfectly possible to say, for example, "Liber est Mārcī", using a nominative and a genitive, to say "The book is Marcus's." The important thing is that you can't use the nominative for the subject and the accusative for the predicate, or vice versa, but you can have nominative and genitive or nominative and dative if they make sense.

"Dixit Dracula sanguinem eius/ei colorem pulchrum esse" = "Dracula said that his blood was a beautiful colour""Dixit Dracula colorem sanguinis eius/ei pulchrum esse" = "Dracula said that the colour of his blood was beautiful"

Ah, nuts. It hadn't even occurred to me to think of it as "his blood is a beautiful color"; I guess I got hung up on "the color of his blood is beautiful". I guess the word order threw me off... I'm not entirely used to 'reordering' sentences in my head, especially with 'esse'. I prefer using subject-verb-object (SVO) ordering with forms of "esse" and I get the impression I may not be the only one, though Lingua Latina does use SOV ordering pretty consistently. Wheelock seems to use the SVO ordering more often for "esse".

I think something else that hasn't been mentioned is that the sentence you originally gave - 'Sanguinem eius colorem pulchrum esse' dixit Dracula - is quoted direct speech, not indirect speech, since it has quotation marks. Compare these to see the difference:

rkday wrote:I think something else that hasn't been mentioned is that the sentence you originally gave - 'Sanguinem eius colorem pulchrum esse' dixit Dracula - is quoted direct speech, not indirect speech, since it has quotation marks. Compare these to see the difference:

"That his blood is a beautiful colour" said Dracula.

Dracula said that his blood is a beautiful colour.

Orberg deals with this as follows:

Medicus: 'Lingua eius rubra est.' [with quotation marks].. but then to report indirect speech - using accusativus + infinitivus he has Amelia telling Syra what the doctor said as follows: Aemilia "Dicit 'linguam eius rubram esse'." I'm trying to do the latter. Dixit Dracula 'Sanguinem eius colorem pulchrum esse'. My understanding of accusativus + infinitivus and its use in indirect speech is that ALL of the nouns have to be accusative - but not the genitive pronoun in this case....though this latter comment maybe inviting a massive and devastating correction from the many wider and more learned people here..

rkday -- the Lingua Latina series of books uses single quotation marks around indirect speech and double quotation marks around direct speech; pmda was simply following that convention. No, I don't really know why Lingua Latina does it. I thought maybe it was just a crutch to help a beginning student, but I recently got the Lingua Latina edition of Caesar's De Bello Gallico and it still does it. (That doesn't rule out the possibility that it is a crutch, I just figure it's less likely when you start getting into real Latin authors...)

I wonder if Ørberg's native language, Danish, has this feature. It's pretty common for Latin writers to partially import the punctuation style of their native languages. If it's not in Danish, where might it have come from...?

pmda wrote:My understanding of accusativus + infinitivus and its use in indirect speech is that ALL of the nouns have to be accusative - but not the genitive pronoun in this case....

I can't think of any situation where you'll need to make more than two nouns accusative in indirect speech -- the one that's the direct object of dīxit, and the one that's linked to it with "esse". Of course, this is counting compound nouns like "Iulium Caesarem" as one noun.

I have to admit that that line sounds odd to me and my understanding was along the lines of the note in this book. But I would trust Orberg over me and Alatius explained the construction, although I couldn't find any examples of this usage. Does anyone know any with this or a similar verb?

I don't, not having the book, but pmda's reply to my first post (and pmda can correct if I'm wrong) suggests that Orberg's sentence does not have a habitual sense. Otherwise, was I correct in saying it should be "Pocula gemmis ornata sunt"?

I believe "Pocula gemmis ornata sunt" and "Pocula gemmis ornantur" are both OK. If I can live with the ambiguity of "the cups are adorned with jewels" and "the cups have been adorned with jewels" I can live with the ambiguity of "The cups are adorned with jewels" and "The cups are being adorned with jewels". I'm no authority, though.

I don't, not having the book, but pmda's reply to my first post (and pmda can correct if I'm wrong) suggests that Orberg's sentence does not have a habitual sense. Otherwise, was I correct in saying it should be "Pocula gemmis ornata sunt"?

Not sure...I think Orberg is simply saying that her neck is decorated with a string of pearls - at the moment. I'm not able to follow the previous number of posts....so I'm not sure what's at issue...

pmda wrote:Not sure...I think Orberg is simply saying that her neck is decorated with a string of pearls - at the moment. I'm not able to follow the previous number of posts....so I'm not sure what's at issue...

Of course he is, pmda. That was just my joke about not knowing how often Lydia wore pearls. Modus.irrealis thought Orberg should have written otherwise. I don't believe so, myself. I think "ornata est" and "ornatur" are both OK for "she is adorned".

pmda wrote:Not sure...I think Orberg is simply saying that her neck is decorated with a string of pearls - at the moment. I'm not able to follow the previous number of posts....so I'm not sure what's at issue...

The passive in English has distinct meanings that are distinguished in a lot of languages -- a quick search found this discussing it in terms of Latin. (Since that's old the same distinction is made in German and you can see what I mean here).

How do you understand the first example? I don't see how it would indicate a current state. It seems to me that either "quondam" means "sometimes" and "pingitur" represents a repeated action or it means "at a certain time" and "pingitur" is a historic present and represents the act. I should say that after finding that German link above, that's a much better way to describe what I was getting at, "ornatur" = dynamic, focus on process, "ornatus est" = stative, focus on state (in its one sense, since it can also refer to the act in the past like you mentioned). The second one is tricky. Before this discussion I would have assumed that "pingitur" is indicating that this painting is a continuous process in some sense (the ether gets painted with stars), but now I'm not sure, since a stative interpretation fits perfectly.

"Dixit Dracula sanguinem eius/ei colorem pulchrum esse" = "Dracula said that his blood was a beautiful colour""Dixit Dracula colorem sanguinis eius/ei pulchrum esse" = "Dracula said that the colour of his blood was beautiful"

I have been translating indirect speech as something like "Dracula said that his blood is a beautiful color". This may just be a matter of taste or it may be my lack of understanding, but why would you use the perfect/imperfect of 'esse' in indirect speech?

Just in case I'm giving the wrong impression, I'm fine with this transformation (which is the one Alatius gave before) with meaning of a current state. So I don't think the Orberg sentence is wrong but I would guess that using the passive participle would be more common. I know I'm being picky with the examples (which I appreciate), but I would like an example that compels you to read it a certain way, rather than merely admitting such a reading.